eli5: Who would be the indigenous peoples of Europe?
In: Other
Here’s a map showing some of the general trends of the first migrations out of Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations#/media/File:Putative_migration_waves_out_of_Africa.png
It’s tricky, because our ancestors who migrated from Africa weren’t homo sapiens yet, and they were well before the point of having written language so they had little ability to leave us anything besides fossils to tell us about themselves.
We could maybe count the first neanderthals to get into Turkey as the indigenous peoples of Europe, or if our definition of ‘people’ is homo sapiens, then they started popping up by evolutionary processes maybe 50,000 years ago around the Mediterranean Sea. They couldn’t go much further north for a while, because an ice age had made most of Europe a little too cold for people, but as the land warmed up, the people inched north and started to settle Europe. Those first groups get names like proto-Germanic and proto-Slav, depending on where they settled.
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